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Ignorance
Really good article on the general ignorance of Americans in Truthout.
Couple of factoids that relate to where we are and why we are there:
- Only 35% know that Congress can override a presidential veto.
- Some 49% think the president can suspend the Constitution.
- Some 45% believe that revolutionary speech is punishable under the Constitution.
Half the people think the President can simply CHOOSE to suspend the Constitution? No wonder Bush / Rove / Cheney / Rumsfeld could feel that they could get away with the crap that they have been getting away with. Hell's bells, I wonder how many even know what The Constitution is about and why it exists.
Well, there is this that should give one pause:
"About 1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half of Americans can name at least two members of the fictional cartoon family, according to a survey," and about the same 1 in 4 can name all 5 characters! Only 1 in 1000 can name the 5 constitutional freedoms in our First Amendment (give me 4 of 5).
Interesting read...
Excerpted from "Just How Stupid Are We?," by Rick Shenkman, from:
view link
Couple of factoids that relate to where we are and why we are there:
- Only 35% know that Congress can override a presidential veto.
- Some 49% think the president can suspend the Constitution.
- Some 45% believe that revolutionary speech is punishable under the Constitution.
Half the people think the President can simply CHOOSE to suspend the Constitution? No wonder Bush / Rove / Cheney / Rumsfeld could feel that they could get away with the crap that they have been getting away with. Hell's bells, I wonder how many even know what The Constitution is about and why it exists.
Well, there is this that should give one pause:
"About 1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half of Americans can name at least two members of the fictional cartoon family, according to a survey," and about the same 1 in 4 can name all 5 characters! Only 1 in 1000 can name the 5 constitutional freedoms in our First Amendment (give me 4 of 5).
Interesting read...
Excerpted from "Just How Stupid Are We?," by Rick Shenkman, from:
view link
Slate Running Mates
Test Given By The Slate Website To See Who Would Be The Best Running Mate For Your Candidate.
Took The Test. Narrowed Obama's Choices To:
Al Gore
Bill Nelson
Bob Graham
Sam Nunn
Thought It Only Fair To Work My Magic For McCain. God Knows I'm Fair! Oops A Particularly Nasty Bolt Of Lightning Just Came Near Me! My Answer For McCain:
Joe Lieberman
view link
Took The Test. Narrowed Obama's Choices To:
Al Gore
Bill Nelson
Bob Graham
Sam Nunn
Thought It Only Fair To Work My Magic For McCain. God Knows I'm Fair! Oops A Particularly Nasty Bolt Of Lightning Just Came Near Me! My Answer For McCain:
Joe Lieberman
view link
Despot, is the word Despot?
Weird train of thought this morning, but reading about the N CA judge who would not toss out the suit against Bush related to his violation of FISA and his claim of prerogative to do so. Then, I connected with the Boston Globe's reprinting of The Constitution (http://www.truthout.org/article/in- congress-july-4-1776) which I started to read.
Then, in the third paragraph, I read this from that document: "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
and I looked up the word Despot from the Wiki free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Despotism) where it defined Despotism as:
"Despotism is a form of government by a single authority, either an individual or tightly knit group, which rules with absolute political power. In its classical form, a despotism is a state where one single person, called a Despot, wields all the power and authority, and everyone else is considered their slave. This form of despotism was the first known form of statehood and civilization; the Pharaoh of Egypt is exemplary of the classical Despot.
The term now implies tyrannical rule. However, in enlightened absolutism (also known as benevolent or enlightened despotism), which came to prominence in 18th century Europe, absolute monarchs used their authority to institute a number of reforms in the political systems and societies of their countries. This movement was probably largely triggered by the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment."
and I am thinking, "Despot, Bush is a Despot."
HE and he alone is The Decider. He takes the work of a feeble (enfeebled?) Congress and rewrites it with those little Letters that he does so that the Law is actually what he wants and is not the work of the House and the Senate. He violated The Constitution, and admits such.
And we do not hold him accountable. Maybe the word "slave" from the definition is a bit too strong. Then again, maybe not. IS he allowed to secretly spy on us as individuals and against the law? Can he manufacture evidence and then simply say "never mind" after we invade and conquer an independent country? (Wasn't that,in part, why Hitler was so hated and why all those in his administration were found guilty of war crimes at Nuremberg?)
So, it just got me thinking...
Despot, Bush is a Despot.
Ya think?
Then, in the third paragraph, I read this from that document: "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
and I looked up the word Despot from the Wiki free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Despotism) where it defined Despotism as:
"Despotism is a form of government by a single authority, either an individual or tightly knit group, which rules with absolute political power. In its classical form, a despotism is a state where one single person, called a Despot, wields all the power and authority, and everyone else is considered their slave. This form of despotism was the first known form of statehood and civilization; the Pharaoh of Egypt is exemplary of the classical Despot.
The term now implies tyrannical rule. However, in enlightened absolutism (also known as benevolent or enlightened despotism), which came to prominence in 18th century Europe, absolute monarchs used their authority to institute a number of reforms in the political systems and societies of their countries. This movement was probably largely triggered by the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment."
and I am thinking, "Despot, Bush is a Despot."
HE and he alone is The Decider. He takes the work of a feeble (enfeebled?) Congress and rewrites it with those little Letters that he does so that the Law is actually what he wants and is not the work of the House and the Senate. He violated The Constitution, and admits such.
And we do not hold him accountable. Maybe the word "slave" from the definition is a bit too strong. Then again, maybe not. IS he allowed to secretly spy on us as individuals and against the law? Can he manufacture evidence and then simply say "never mind" after we invade and conquer an independent country? (Wasn't that,in part, why Hitler was so hated and why all those in his administration were found guilty of war crimes at Nuremberg?)
So, it just got me thinking...
Despot, Bush is a Despot.
Ya think?
From Common Dreams
My thoughts a in more eloquent manner than I could hope to express. This country and its politicians are a disgrace and none of them has the right to criticize any other country or its leaders. From the page:
Published on Friday, July 4, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
The Ashes Have Been Passed To A New Generation
by David Michael Green
We live in the most astonishing of times, politically speaking.
And I don't mean that as a compliment.
There is so much I would hate to try to have explain to an alien about our politics. Same with a human five centuries from now - it's just that I'm not so sure there'll be any.
In America, a regressive majority of one on the Supreme Court disappears a whole clause from the Second Amendment in order to interpret it favorably for an industry merchandizing mass quantities of small death machines. Thirty or forty thousand of us are swept away every year by these killers, but few find the coincidence of that fact with their ubiquitous presence - by some estimates, there is nearly one gun for every American nowadays - somehow noteworthy.
One president has oral sex in a private consensual relationship and lies about it, so right-wing freaks spend $40 million to investigate this most heinous of crimes and bring impeachment charges against a president for only the second time in American history. Meanwhile, one of their own admits to trashing the Constitution at every turn and isn't even investigated, let alone impeached, let alone removed from office.
This same president plunges the world into war on the basis of non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but couldn't be less concerned when North Korea actually goes nuclear on his watch. This president goes to war to bring democracy to the Arab world, but can't even be bothered to pressure Egypt or Saudi Arabia to move a tad in that direction. This president uses an attack on the US to justify international belligerence and mass human rights violations, but doesn't seem very interested in even attacking, let alone vanquishing, the supposed perpetrator.
Continues at the link view link
Published on Friday, July 4, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
The Ashes Have Been Passed To A New Generation
by David Michael Green
We live in the most astonishing of times, politically speaking.
And I don't mean that as a compliment.
There is so much I would hate to try to have explain to an alien about our politics. Same with a human five centuries from now - it's just that I'm not so sure there'll be any.
In America, a regressive majority of one on the Supreme Court disappears a whole clause from the Second Amendment in order to interpret it favorably for an industry merchandizing mass quantities of small death machines. Thirty or forty thousand of us are swept away every year by these killers, but few find the coincidence of that fact with their ubiquitous presence - by some estimates, there is nearly one gun for every American nowadays - somehow noteworthy.
One president has oral sex in a private consensual relationship and lies about it, so right-wing freaks spend $40 million to investigate this most heinous of crimes and bring impeachment charges against a president for only the second time in American history. Meanwhile, one of their own admits to trashing the Constitution at every turn and isn't even investigated, let alone impeached, let alone removed from office.
This same president plunges the world into war on the basis of non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but couldn't be less concerned when North Korea actually goes nuclear on his watch. This president goes to war to bring democracy to the Arab world, but can't even be bothered to pressure Egypt or Saudi Arabia to move a tad in that direction. This president uses an attack on the US to justify international belligerence and mass human rights violations, but doesn't seem very interested in even attacking, let alone vanquishing, the supposed perpetrator.
Continues at the link view link
Just a thought
And maybe it's not a thought, but it has been bouncing around in my head for years now. In America's birth, we fought the redcoats.
We fought the red Chinese, the red Russkies, and now the red party. Happy 4th of July, ya'll.
We fought the red Chinese, the red Russkies, and now the red party. Happy 4th of July, ya'll.
How Dare They Rip the Fourth Amendment?
How Dare They Rip the Fourth Amendment?
by: Joseph L. Galloway, McClatchy Newspapers
Early next week the US Senate will vote on an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with a few small amendments intended to immunize telecommunications corporations that assisted our government in the warrantless and illegal wiretapping it has grown to love.
That such a gutting of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution even made it out of committee is yet another stain on the gutless and seemingly powerless Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.
That a majority on both sides of the aisle - not least of them the presumptive nominees for president of both political parties - intend to vote for such a violation of Americans' right to privacy and of the sanctity of their personal communications is a stunning surrender to those who want us to live in fear forever.
We are living in a time when the right of habeas corpus - which simply put is your right to be brought before a proper court of law where the government is made to prove that there is good and legal reason to detain you - recently survived by a margin of only one vote at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Now these bad actors are prepared to set aside your right to privacy - written into the Constitution as a key part of our Bill of Rights - with hardly a nod in the direction of the true patriots who rebelled against an English king and his army to guarantee those rights.
That they will do this while the last empty phrases of the political windbags at the Fourth of July celebrations are still echoing across a thousand city parks and the bright red, white and blue bunting and blizzard of American flags still flap in the breeze is little short of breath-taking.
How dare they?
Those denizens of the White House and Capitol Hill and all those gray granite buildings that line avenues with names like Constitution and Independence in the nation's capitol would have us believe that we must trade our rights, all of our rights, for some measure of security from the terrorists.
They would have us believe that a nation of 300 million people must surrender what a million other Americans gave their lives in war to protect in order to protect us from a couple of hundred fanatics hiding in caves in Waziristan.
Benjamin Franklin himself wrote of such a debate:
"Those who can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The fact that British troops, operating on flimsy general warrants handed out by local magistrates, were kicking in the doors of ordinary Americans and rifling through their pantries and papers in search of smuggled, untaxed goods was a prime reason why our ancestors rebelled against their king and went to war.
This is WHY we celebrate the Fourth of July. This is why the vote on renewing the expanded version of FISA and whitewashing the egregious violations of the Fourth Amendment for seven long years by our government is important.
If neither John McCain, the Republican, or Barrack Obama, the Democrat, can find the courage to oppose such a violation of so basic a right then what are we to do for a president, a successor to George W. Bush, The Decider, who has since 9/11 decided what rights you are entitled to keep, what laws he will or will not obey, and whether you will be protected by these words of the Constitution:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
That's it. That's the Fourth Amendment. That is what these folks in Washington, D.C., have violated continuously and in secret for seven long years.
Somewhere across an ocean and a desert, hiding in his cave, a man of hate named Osama bin Laden is laughing up the sleeve of his dirty robe at the thought that he and a small handful of fellow fanatics could tie a great nation in knots - knots of fear stoked by our own leaders.
We have done incalculably more and greater damage to ourselves since September 11, 2001, than a thousand bin Ladens and ten thousand al Qaida recruits could ever have done to us.
Franklin D. Roosevelt famously declared that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." Now it would seem that we have no one to fear but ourselves and our leaders.
The questions I pose are these:
How can even one senator on either side of the aisle in good conscience vote in favor of this law that does nothing to enhance our security and everything to diminish our rights as a free people?
How can both men who seek to become our next president cast such a vote when both should be standing shoulder-to-shoulder declaring that they would govern by our consent and with our approval, not by wielding the coercive and corrosive and corrupt powers that King George III and his latter-day namesake from Texas thought are theirs by divine right?
(This from view link )
by: Joseph L. Galloway, McClatchy Newspapers
Early next week the US Senate will vote on an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with a few small amendments intended to immunize telecommunications corporations that assisted our government in the warrantless and illegal wiretapping it has grown to love.
That such a gutting of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution even made it out of committee is yet another stain on the gutless and seemingly powerless Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.
That a majority on both sides of the aisle - not least of them the presumptive nominees for president of both political parties - intend to vote for such a violation of Americans' right to privacy and of the sanctity of their personal communications is a stunning surrender to those who want us to live in fear forever.
We are living in a time when the right of habeas corpus - which simply put is your right to be brought before a proper court of law where the government is made to prove that there is good and legal reason to detain you - recently survived by a margin of only one vote at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Now these bad actors are prepared to set aside your right to privacy - written into the Constitution as a key part of our Bill of Rights - with hardly a nod in the direction of the true patriots who rebelled against an English king and his army to guarantee those rights.
That they will do this while the last empty phrases of the political windbags at the Fourth of July celebrations are still echoing across a thousand city parks and the bright red, white and blue bunting and blizzard of American flags still flap in the breeze is little short of breath-taking.
How dare they?
Those denizens of the White House and Capitol Hill and all those gray granite buildings that line avenues with names like Constitution and Independence in the nation's capitol would have us believe that we must trade our rights, all of our rights, for some measure of security from the terrorists.
They would have us believe that a nation of 300 million people must surrender what a million other Americans gave their lives in war to protect in order to protect us from a couple of hundred fanatics hiding in caves in Waziristan.
Benjamin Franklin himself wrote of such a debate:
"Those who can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The fact that British troops, operating on flimsy general warrants handed out by local magistrates, were kicking in the doors of ordinary Americans and rifling through their pantries and papers in search of smuggled, untaxed goods was a prime reason why our ancestors rebelled against their king and went to war.
This is WHY we celebrate the Fourth of July. This is why the vote on renewing the expanded version of FISA and whitewashing the egregious violations of the Fourth Amendment for seven long years by our government is important.
If neither John McCain, the Republican, or Barrack Obama, the Democrat, can find the courage to oppose such a violation of so basic a right then what are we to do for a president, a successor to George W. Bush, The Decider, who has since 9/11 decided what rights you are entitled to keep, what laws he will or will not obey, and whether you will be protected by these words of the Constitution:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
That's it. That's the Fourth Amendment. That is what these folks in Washington, D.C., have violated continuously and in secret for seven long years.
Somewhere across an ocean and a desert, hiding in his cave, a man of hate named Osama bin Laden is laughing up the sleeve of his dirty robe at the thought that he and a small handful of fellow fanatics could tie a great nation in knots - knots of fear stoked by our own leaders.
We have done incalculably more and greater damage to ourselves since September 11, 2001, than a thousand bin Ladens and ten thousand al Qaida recruits could ever have done to us.
Franklin D. Roosevelt famously declared that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." Now it would seem that we have no one to fear but ourselves and our leaders.
The questions I pose are these:
How can even one senator on either side of the aisle in good conscience vote in favor of this law that does nothing to enhance our security and everything to diminish our rights as a free people?
How can both men who seek to become our next president cast such a vote when both should be standing shoulder-to-shoulder declaring that they would govern by our consent and with our approval, not by wielding the coercive and corrosive and corrupt powers that King George III and his latter-day namesake from Texas thought are theirs by divine right?
(This from view link )
Happy Independence Day -
Happy Independence Day - Let's put the
Constitution back on the table!
"As we once again celebrate our Independence as a nation, let us celebrate freedom from fear and pledge that government 'of the people' will survive in this land that we love."
- Congressman Dennis Kucinich
Constitution back on the table!
"As we once again celebrate our Independence as a nation, let us celebrate freedom from fear and pledge that government 'of the people' will survive in this land that we love."
- Congressman Dennis Kucinich
Bootstraps, Obama Style
And we thought the Republicans we've been suffering under were masters of directing public monies to their friends' pockets.
view link
view link
